Allstate Online

Interface Design for Project Management Tool

Allstate Online

Interface Design for Project Management Tool

The Client

Allstate is a long time client of Leo Burnett. Besides the varying personalities, the account has multiple campaigns, over 14 business units and specific benefit and promotional offerings. It also had an aggressive online media buy with multiple vendors and target markets. Allstate was about 40% of my billable hours from 2011– 2015. This large scope of work was produced from creative concept to design, production, QA and release to market.

Allstate currently features multiple personalities for the Your in good hands brand campaign thatstarted in 1957. Dennis Haysbert, starting in 2010 and most recently, Adam DeVine, appeals to a younger audience.

The design problem

This volume of work, creative updates and deadlines produced some operational challenges.The project managers were experiencing excessive revisions at various stages affecting timelines and budgets. Although some assets were in a central location, there was no efficient method of access, review and reference to the work. The project management team asked me to estimate the creation of a style guide for the team.

My alternative solution

I knew a style guide would be out of date soon after completion and updates would be costly and inefficient. I asked management to allow me to pursue a better way to solve the problem. Since I had worked closely with the dev team over the years I had some inside knowledge of the process and this gave me an idea.

I knew that the dev team kept an updated dot.net library that they used for staging review,QA, quick updates and archiving previous creative solutions. I worked with the lead engineerfor Allstate and I designed an interface tool for that content. It saved time and money by giving broader and direct access to the team and it was updated quickly because it evolved organically as projects evolved. Centralizing and simplifying the path eliminated errors in asset usage, provided quicker start times and reduced overload in communication streams.

Above is asample screen from the Online Preview Tool with notes on user functionality. Assets in area 1 were previously buried on a server. I added access here to maximize efficiency for all team members. All in one place! Select image or click her to view a basic prototype of the tool.

The results

The concept was well received, especially by the creative leads and project managers.I was asked to present to the CFO and he liked the idea enough to provide funding for it.